Rough Rides

“The Place Beyond the Pines” and “Olympus Has Fallen.”

Ryan Gosling plays a stunt biker in a movie directed by Derek Cianfrance.Credit Illustration by David Palumbo

Derek Cianfrance’s earnest, broodingly ambitious movie “The Place Beyond the Pines” begins with a close-up of Ryan Gosling’s tattooed torso, which, as Emma Stone noted, in “Crazy Stupid Love,” looks Photoshopped for perfection. The shot continues, without a cut, as Gosling—a stunt biker named Luke—walks into a carnival tent, climbs onto a motorcycle, rides into a steel globe (“the Cage of Death”), and zips around the interior of the structure like a fly in a jar. It’s existentialism in a nutshell: life and possibly death on a journey going nowhere. Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine”) and his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, stay close to the restless Luke as he tears down the streets and through the surrounding woods of Schenectady, New York, where the travelling carnival is playing. Luke encounters a woman he had a fling with last time he was in town, Romina (Eva Mendes), who now has a baby boy—his son, it turns out. He wants Romina back, but he has no money, so he becomes a bank robber to support her and the child. Now, there may be an interesting movie in the story of a man who’s split between the stability of family life and the anarchy of outlawry, but Cianfrance, devoted to Gosling’s macho mystique, hasn’t made it. Cool, violent, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, Gosling reprises his inexorable-loner routine from “Drive.” Cianfrance and the screenwriters Ben Coccio and Darius Marder wrote thirty-seven drafts of the script, but gave him almost nothing to say. He rides, he smokes, he knocks over banks, he loves his baby, and that’s it.

Perhaps Cianfrance didn’t want to waste words on Gosling, because, in a shocking move, he disposes of him early, in deliberate imitation of the way Hitchcock disposed of Janet Leigh in “Psycho.” Gosling doesn’t go near a shower, but he gets plugged by a character we’ve never seen before: Avery (Bradley Cooper), a lawyer who decided to become a cop to do the people’s work on the street. Avery is the new protagonist, and Cooper gives a quiet, serious performance as a straight arrow. The second part of “Pines” is all about Avery’s fight against police corruption. It’s the kind of story that’s been done in the movies many times in urban settings that are—how shall I put it?—more richly colorful than Schenectady. The policeman’s crusade initially seems disconnected from the first part of the movie, but it turns out that Avery, after shooting Luke, and leaving his little boy fatherless, feels so guilty that he has trouble looking at his own baby son. Does this make any sense psychologically? I’m not sure, but, again, the idea might have worked if Cianfrance had dramatized it. Instead, he produces the admission of remorse from Avery in a long scene with a psychiatrist. We never see Avery and his son together until the film’s third act, when the boy is seventeen.

After a while, we realize that “Pines” is supposed to be about turbulent male relationships through the generations—what fathers and sons give to one another and withhold from one another. I’m all in favor of experimental narrative forms and deep thematic undercurrents, but this movie feels patchy and underdone. Cianfrance does, however, have a commanding way with actors, and he pushes them to the edge. In the third section, Luke’s and Avery’s sons, who don’t know each other—or their fathers’ history—get thrown together in high school and start a friendship that falls into an uneasy combative rivalry. Cianfrance has cast two intense young actors, Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen, as the boys, who are both into Ecstasy and Oxycontin, and he sustains a nasty friction between them, sandpaper rubbing sandpaper. Eva Mendes, as Luke’s lover, a proud woman in love with a dangerous man, puts every bit of anguished longing and overstrained faith that she can into her few scenes; she surges toward Gosling, but the movie tosses her aside. “Pines,” centered on the male line, also slights Avery’s wife, played by the elegant Rose Byrne. When Emory Cohen, cast as her and Avery’s son, shows up, he’s a loutish kid with a Long Island street accent. Even as a rebel and a screwup who never had his father’s love, he isn’t believable as the child of either parent.

Cianfrance keeps his eye on the long lines of the film, but a lot of the character details are fuzzy, or approximate, or just missing, and the movie, which holds your attention from moment to moment, by the end leaves you grasping for the experience you haven’t had. It may be one of the casualties of the auteur theory and the general solemnization of directors that some of the most talented people now just start shooting a script as if big ideas and directorial vision were enough to hold a movie together. Sometimes a little hard common sense helps, too.

The American flag, waving in freedom-loving air above the White House, is shot full of holes and rudely tossed onto the lawn in “Olympus Has Fallen,” a bullet-ridden hunk of paranoia that should stir up anyone not sufficiently attuned to the threat posed to the United States by North Korea. The Koreans, it seems, are coming. An élite commando squad of forty, led by a thick-shouldered terrorist named Kang (Rick Yune), fight their way into the building, take the President (Aaron Eckhart) hostage, execute the Vice-President on television, kick the Secretary of State (Melissa Leo) in the stomach, and, in general, soil the linens of America’s citadel. The thugs threaten to kill the President, too. Their demands are the withdrawal of American forces from South Korea and of the Seventh Fleet from waters near the Korean peninsula; they want to “unify” the Korean people. They are also trying to get the secret codes that will allow them to blow up American I.C.B.M.s in their silos, thus leaving the country a wasteland. The Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman) takes command, but the only one who can save the President—not to mention the world—is a disgraced former Secret Service agent, Mike Banning. He’s played by Gerard Butler, a second-tier star from Scotland whose lack of humor may remind you why Bruce Willis has lasted so long as an action hero. Banning runs into the building and proceeds to eliminate one terrorist after another, bashing one guy over the head with a bust of Lincoln. The movie is “Die Hard” in the White House, a combination of the violent and the cheesy which may nevertheless push a few buttons.

The box-office gods seem to have smiled on this project; just before “Olympus” opened, the North Koreans conducted an underground nuclear test and then threatened to “target” America with their high-level missile technology. In principle, I’m willing to be concerned about North Korea. I’m even willing to be entertained by an action movie about Korean terrorists. But “Olympus” is an entirely conventional film, and one can’t help feeling that the director, Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”), and the first-time screenwriters Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt were looking around for a new enemy and just settled on the North Koreans. Beneath the alarm bell summoning the nation to a new danger, most moviegoers will detect the familiar tones of big-budget exploitation.

I liked Fuqua’s volatile work in “Training Day” (2001), and this movie starts well. In a kind of prologue, set eighteen months earlier, the President’s car spins out of control on a bridge during a furious snowstorm. Banning saves his boss, but allows the First Lady (Ashley Judd) to fall to her death. (Like Clint Eastwood’s Secret Service agent in “In the Line of Fire,” he’s haunted by his failure, and needs to prove himself again.) This nighttime sequence is eerily beautiful and frightening. The assault on the White House is unconvincing, but it has our curiosity going for it: how do you storm the best-defended building in the world? Apparently, you begin by getting a slow-moving military plane to shoot up Washington, which creates something of a distraction. Then innocent-looking Korean tourists outside the White House suddenly pull machine guns and explosives out of their backpacks, blast through the fence, and fight their way in. But once Fuqua moves inside he loses our attention, because we’ve watched what follows dozens of times before. There are endless scenes of Banning moving down darkened corridors and engaging in firefights and hand-to-hand combat, shot in the usual fragmented way, which makes it impossible to see most of what is happening.

And Fuqua doesn’t deliver on what he has set up. Early in the film, he makes much of the President’s young son, who knows the inner corridors and tunnels of the White House, but, once the assault begins, the kid hides; he never gets to use much of his knowledge. The President is supposed to be a tough guy, but he’s tied up in an underground bunker most of the time, getting slapped around; he never really gets into the movie, either. “Olympus” ends with a burst of patriotic fervor and the words “They came to desecrate a way of life. But they gave us a gift, a chance for rebirth.” The movie isn’t a desecration, but it’s action filmmaking, not America, that needs to be reborn. ♦

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